Center for Restorative Activism

Here are some basic principles that help to frame what restorative activism is about:

The historical moment calls on us to identify and focus on root causes. I believe the historical moment boils down to a choice between continuation with the life-denying worldview based on separateness, and a life affirming worldview based on the direct experience of interrelatedness. The belief in separateness can be singled out as a root cause of the crises we face and this shows us what we are really up against.

Review: Walking the talk: Developing ethics frameworks for the practice of restorative justice

While restorative justice is a theory that encompasses a set of values for how justice should be done, maintaining those values and the restorative focus can become difficult in day-to-day practice. People working in restorative justice organisations – whether staff or volunteers – make a myriad of decisions related to practices each day. Such decisions may be related to work with clients, work with other organisations or internal processes and interactions. How can they make these decisions while maintaining the integrity of their restorative justice programme?

Susan Sharpe seeks to answer this question with Walking the talk: Developing ethics frameworks for the practice of restorative justice. In the 62 page publication, Sharpe sets out a process that organisations and individual practitioners can use to develop an ethics framework to empower and guide decisionmaking. In doing so, she avoids the contentious issue of setting standards by developing the steps in a process that each organisation can use to develop a framework that has direct meaning for it and the various issues that it faces.

Crossing the divide

It has often been my experience that restorative justice can span the conservative-liberal divide. Concerns for victims and for reducing the costs of imprisonment are often common to both. The concept of offenders facing up to what they have done makes intuitive sense to many. Values such as responsibility, respect and relationship are often shared along the spectrum. What we mean by these values and ideas, however, and what motivates us to embrace them, are crucial issues.

The lessons to be gleaned from the movement against indeterminate sentencing in the U.S. are instructive. Eventually both progressives and conservatives came together to replace indeterminate sentences with determinate sentences motivated by a just deserts philosophy. The resulting lengthened mandatory sentences dramatically increased the prison population. While there was some confluence of policy positions, the underlying values and motivations of the various parties were quite different. The results have been in many ways catastrophic.

The need for a new kind of justice in youth crime

As the two leading providers of restorative justice for youth in
Sonoma County — Restorative Resources and RECOURSE Mediation Services —
we know what works when dealing with youthful offenders, and why. The
restorative justice practices used by our non-profit agencies are
firmly focused on repairing harm done to people and relationships,
rather than imposing a punishment disconnected from the needs of those
harmed. Restorative justice gives victims a voice in how they want
things to be “made right.”

The evidence shows that in
communities, including school communities, restorative practices build
social capital and achieve social discipline through participatory
learning and decision-making. When there is wrongdoing, everyone
affected by the behavior gets to play an active role in addressing the
wrong and making things right. This goes far beyond punishment; it
makes real, positive change possible.